| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Awaiting Armageddon: How Americans Faced the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Alice L. George. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xxvi, 238 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8078-2828-9.)

No episode of the Cold War was more harrowing than the Cuban missile crisis of late October 1962, when the fate of the planet seemed to be suspended. At this moment geopolitical conflict and the nuclear age most dangerously intersected. The opening of Soviet archives and the willingness of surviving key participants to provide oral history have recently enabled scholars to triangulate how Washington, Moscow, and Havana managed to come so perilously close to World War III and how subtly they stepped back from the abyss. What interests Alice L. George is less the suicide pact that John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev seemed about to sign than the responses of ordinary Americans to the prospect of imminent extinction. The scope of Awaiting Armageddon is not really the thirteen days in which Kennedy played tough on the outside (while cutting a deal in secret), but rather the eight days of nail-biting tension that the public endured. It wondered whether the naval quarantine of Cuba would be broken, whether the Soviets' offensive missiles on the island would be withdrawn, and whether the citizenry would enjoy fifteen minutes' warning before the rockets' red glare would signal Armageddon.

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